How well do atmospheric reanalyses reproduce observed winds in coastal regions of Mexico?

Thomas, Sharyn; Nicolau, Susie; Martínez‐Alvarado, Oscar; Drew, Daniel; Bloomfield, Hannah

doi:10.1002/met.2023

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…This suggests that despite the proximity between the two stations, the winds are caused by very different sources. However, recent studies (Morales-Ruvalcaba et al, 2020;Thomas et al, 2020) have shown that Baja California Sur stations are the least well represented stations by the interpolated ERA-5 data, possibly due to the complex nature of the terrain over the peninsula with 2 coastlines and high and complex orography in between over the width of around 50 km. Therefore, the differences between nearby stations might arise from the use of the ERA-5 reanalysis here.…”

Section: The Seasonality Of Mexican Weather Patterns and Extreme Wind...mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Atmospheric reanalyses are long-term (typically spanning several decades), gridded data sets combining a fixed version of a numerical weather prediction model and a fixed data assimilation scheme to assimilate a consistent set of observations for the period. There are several global reanalyses available from different institutions, and some efforts have been made to investigate which is the best at reproducing wind observations in different locations (e.g., Olauson, 2018;Ramon et al, 2019), and for sites across Mexico (Thomas et al, 2020). The latter of these studies show that the ERA-5 data set from the ECMWF outperforms ERA-Interim (ECMWF) and MERRA-2 (NASA) at sites across Mexico and so is thus chosen for our study.…”

Section: The Era-5 Reanalysismentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Drivers of Extreme Wind Events in Mexico for Wind Power Applications

Thomas¹,

Martínez‐Alvarado²,

Drew

et al. 2020

Preprint

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<p>In this talk, we investigate the causes of the strongest and weakest winds observed across Mexico and explore the consequences of these to current and future wind energy production in the country. Using 40 years of the ERA-5 atmospheric reanalysis data, we find that the strongest winds in this region are caused by cold surges, where an anticyclone moves South from the Central United States of America resulting in strong Northerly winds across the Gulf of Mexico which channel through the gap in the mountains to the South of Mexico. Other regions have different drivers for high and low wind speed events. The strongest winds across the East coast of Mexico originate from Easterly trade winds propagating across the Gulf of Mexico, whereas those in Baja California Sur are influenced by the proximity of the North Pacific High. These regions in Mexico have&#160;peak (and sustained low) wind speeds at different times of year&#160;which suggests that wind farms in different regions could compliment one another to&#160;optimise wind power generation. However, all stations but&#160;Baja California Sur see the same weather patterns associated with weak wind events, meaning that low wind power production may be unavoidable at these times. The conditions that proceed these sustained periods of strong and weak winds are explored to gain some predictability for wind power applications. The El Nino Southern Oscillation is found to influence wind speeds at some locations across Mexico at sub-seasonal time-scales.</p>

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Section: The Seasonality Of Mexican Weather Patterns and Extreme Wind...mentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: The Era-5 Reanalysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Drivers of Extreme Wind Events in Mexico for Wind Power Applications

Thomas¹,

Martínez‐Alvarado²,

Drew

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This clearly limits its ability to predict future WBT in Al-Jouf and more generally everywhere else in the Peninsula. Moreover, the spatial resolution of the ERA5 or the EC-Earth dataset might not capture all mesoand micro-scale variations of meteorological conditions, such as mesoscale convective systems [34], especially in areas with a complex orography, land cover, or near the coasts [35,36]. Even at the smallest grid cell, the simulation output is a collection of values averaged over an area.…”

Section: Mid-to End-century Projections Of Regional Lst and Wbtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Present and future land surface and wet bulb temperatures in the Arabian Peninsula

Safieddine

Clerbaux

Clarisse

et al. 2022

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The Arabian Peninsula exhibits extreme hot summers and has one of the world's largest population growth. We use satellite observations and reanalysis as well as climate model projections to analyze morning and evening land surface temperatures (LST), to refer to processes at the surface, and wet bulb temperatures (WBT) to measure human heat stress. We focus on three regions: The Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, the inland capital of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh and the irrigated agricultural region in Al-Jouf, Saudi Arabia. This study shows that the time of the day is important when studying LST and WBT, with current and future WBT higher in the early summer evenings. It also shows that the effect of humidity brought from waterbodies or through irrigation can significantly increase heat stress. Over the coasts of the Peninsula, humidity decreases LST but increases heat stress via WBT values higher than 25°C in the evening. Riyadh, located in the heart of the Peninsula has lower WBT of 15°C to 17.5°C and LST reaching 42.5°C. Irrigation in the Al-Jouf province decreases LST by up to 10° with respect to its surroundings, while it increases WBT by up to 2.5°. Climate projections over the Arabian Peninsula suggest that global efforts will determine the survivability in this region. The projected increase in LST and WBT approaches +6° and +4°C respectively in the Persian Gulf and Riyadh by the end of the century, posing significant risk on human survivability in the Peninsula unless strict climate mitigation takes place.

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“…The difference in the median and extreme wind speeds in reanalyses in South Atlantic basin was already discussed by Cardoso (2019) and Crespo et al (2022), who showed that compared with coastal buoys ERA5 has smaller biases in representation of the mean wind speed, while CFSR is better for the extreme winds. Moreover, other studies for different regions of the globe also reported this aspect (e.g., Çalışır et al, 2021;Thomas et al, 2021). Many aspects distinguish CFSR from ERA5, such as horizontal resolution (∼38 vs. 25 km), assimilation techniques and data, dynamic cores and physical parameterizations of the models.…”

Section: Climatology Of the Extreme Wind Speed At 10-m Heightmentioning

confidence: 87%

Synoptic Climatology of Subtropical Cyclone Impacts on Near‐Surface Winds Over the South Atlantic Basin

Cardoso

Rocha

Crespo

2022

Earth and Space Science

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Winds and precipitation are two meteorological variables of great impact on the economy and society, especially when extreme events occur. The objective of this study is to investigate the subtropical cyclone (SC) impacts on near‐surface wind extremes (defined by 95th percentile) and precipitation in the South Atlantic basin. For the period 1979–2015, the analysis used two reanalysis data (ERA5 and Climate Forecast System Reanalysis [CFSR]) and estimated precipitation from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) considering the extended warm (from September to February) and cold (from March to August) seasons. A total of 169 SCs occurred in the warm season against 87 in the cold one. Two approaches are used to quantify SC impacts: Lagrangian, where the composites follow the cyclone center, and Eulerian, which considers the averaged environment during the cyclone lifecycle. In general, both approaches indicate SC contribution to the positive anomalies of mean and extreme near‐surface wind speeds to the east and northeast of a cyclogenetic region in southeastern Brazil (RG1). For all analyses conducted, wind speeds from CFSR are higher than in ERA5. The SC activity contributes to the enhancement of precipitation to the east and inside RG1 in an organized northwest‐southeast positive anomaly band from the continent to the ocean, while favoring drier conditions to the south. These positive precipitation anomalies are associated with an anomalous low pressure, low‐level moisture flux convergence and warm advection occurring at the same time with an upper‐level divergent flow near RG1. All these features are intensified in the cold season.

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How well do atmospheric reanalyses reproduce observed winds in coastal regions of Mexico?

Cited by 19 publications

References 41 publications

Drivers of Extreme Wind Events in Mexico for Wind Power Applications

Drivers of Extreme Wind Events in Mexico for Wind Power Applications

Present and future land surface and wet bulb temperatures in the Arabian Peninsula

Synoptic Climatology of Subtropical Cyclone Impacts on Near‐Surface Winds Over the South Atlantic Basin

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